The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has announced that it has taken down Uptobox and Uptostream in an anti-piracy crackdown in France and the United Arab Emirates.

This Tuesday, law enforcement seized Scaleway’s material related to the pirated file-sharing site Uptobox. The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) welcomed the move.

Site managers were in Dubai

ACE has announced that it is shutting down Uptobox and Uptostream, two illegal video hosting sites that are “the most notorious in the world for digital piracy,” according to the alliance. It follows a police raid on Scaleway on Tuesday, but the action is much wider.

Indeed, France is not the only territory where this has been done. The United Arab Emirates was also targeted because the two French nationals who provided the service are based in Dubai, from where they received profits linked to premium subscriptions and advertisements broadcast on these sites.

Therefore, the adventure of several years in these places comes to an end. Uptobox would also have had a very large audience, with the site recording 1.5 billion visits over the past three years, mostly in France, Indonesia, India and Mexico. Therefore, it seemed that there was still success in France, despite the fact that the operators blocked two sites.

Although ACE is a United States-based association, it is a global coalition with several French members, including CANAL+ and France Télévisions. “Canal+ supports swift action when acts of piracy violate intellectual property rights that affect our operations,” said Céline Boyer, CANAL+’s Head of Content Protection.